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source of philosophical reflection and a guide to ordinary circumstances of human life. As well, its monumental influence over Chinese thought makes the text an indispensable element in any informed approach to Chinese culture.
Therefore, this book focuses on the archaic core of the Classic of Changes and proposes a structural anthropological analysis for two main reasons.
First, unlike many treatments of the Yi jing, there is a concern to place the text carefully in the context of the ancient culture that created it, allowing a fuller appreciation of its appearance within a milieu with a divinatory mission comprising a unique orientation toward writing and literature. Employing a transcultural, transtemporal method, honed in analysis of ritual and symbolic practice from a wide range of human groups, structural analysis brings certain strategic advantages to addressing the organization of an archaic cognitive system. The explicit structural approach finds excellent resonance in the conceptualization of the text itself, which stands as a verbal-imagistic field of expression arising from formal, binary structures and from symmetries (formed and broken) between hexagrams.
Secondly, and accordingly, the approach taken here differs from traditional exegesis, which did not and ultimately could not address problems of textual understanding in a holistic sense. The study begins with straightforward questions about reading the text and conducts research on its compositional problems, leading necessarily from its whole to its parts. It does not begin with philological study of individual lexical terms but primarily discovers distributional patterns in the text overall, within the formal structure held to underlie and supplement it, and simultaneously including the written words, in their structural, philological, and symbolic dimensions, that depend upon it. Resembling treatments of mythological and ritual symbolism in other cultures, structural analysis proves apt in isolating design modules that articulate the organization of a profoundly unique effort to model the society and worldview of the people who consolidated millennia of ancient thought into an intriguing expression of the circumstances of the tradition and the time. This book is not a translation of the Classic of Changes, but it presents a careful